This page will present some of the data in terms of trends over the years this survey has been run. Some of the questions were intended for such trend plotting. In other cases, the trends became interesting after the data was taken.
This is very much a work in progress. The first pass at analysis was begun in November 2006. The graphs are crude and not enough thought has gone into the comments. Finally, there is much more data to be brought to this page. Please bear with me. Regardless, as each survey passes, every graph will have to be updated. That's not such a big deal, as I've automated a great deal of it now. But it guarantees that nothing here will be unchanged.
Ru IgarashiFor all graphs, unless otherwise indicated:
Also, keep in mind that the survey ran exclusively on Usenet until 2003. At that point, web forum readers dominated the survey, and any apparent shifts at that time may actually be due to a demographics shift.
This question started out trying to measure the rate of adoption of a brand new and questionable technology, DVD. Back in the mid-nineties, DVD used the latest video compression technology. One of the big questions was whether it could handle animation well enough. It's counter-intuitive to those who don't know much about data compression, but "lossy" compression schemes such as the MPEG used in DVD and VCD don't just look for areas of common color and stillness. They effectively APPROXIMATE areas with functions and toss out functions with some degree of extremeness (similar to optical Fourier filtering). Hence, they don't perform as well on solid lines and sharp edges without compressing less. I'm sure you've seen the blurry, fringed edges in highly compressed JPEG image files (which is why you should never use JPEG compression for line drawings and graphic arts with basic geometries). Worse, because it also uses a zone system, it is possible that wide areas of similar color will be overly approximated as exactly the same as a neighboring zone instead of a transition and you get blocky images. Animation is more susceptible to these compression problems. However, a couple years before the survey started, there were folks like Animeigo's Robert Woodhead that had seen some results and reported there shouldn't be a problem (provided the mastering process was done properly). Then the titles started coming out.
One question was whether this new format would do any better than laserdisc (LD) had. As you can see LD never got further than 35% with fans. This is actually quite an impressive figure, as the general market penetration was nowhere near that. This demonstrates that anime fans tend to be technology adopters, though I wouldn't say they were leading adopters. Within 3 years of the survey, it was clear that DVD was going to make it big. The small size and the greater longevity of the form factor and the better image resolution were big selling points, even though there were many examples of compression problems (that is, "as bad as VHS").
As you can see, right around the time DVD peaked, Tape started its slow decline. That was around the time that many, if not all, commercial anime distributors had stopped releasing tape versions of new releases, and was stopping production of tape versions of existing titles.
The Files data is no surprise, but for rather mundane reasons. The question asked about equipment owned, not what was used to watch anime. At the time the question was begun, most responders likely owned or had access to a home computer. After all, how else were they going to respond to the survey (yes, yes, they could have been using a school computer, instead).
The question of the hour is whether HD-DVD will take over DVD, or if it will be relegated to the same status LD had. The "wish" result may be telling. At LD's peak, DVD had the same wish level. We currently see HD-DVD and DVD at the same wish level, as well as adoption level.
At the time the question began, anime had established some stable blocks on various networks, such as Cartoon Network. But not having access to many of those networks, and not being privvy to what the rest of the world got, I got curious. It's hard to say if there is a trend in the data, but we can say that there's more than a couple hours per week of anime shown in most cases. Maybe, maybe, there's a small decline in availability.
Ah yes, the ages old question of how many viewers prefer subtitled versus dubbed anime. One MUST keep in mind that this survey samples a subset of the full population of viewers of anime. A majority of the responders have university level education and many of them consider themselves technophiles. The very fact that they have network access and have taken the trouble to complete the survey distinguishes them from the average person. Thus it is not surprising that those that prefer subtitled anime outnumber those that prefer dubbed anime 2:1. These results should NOT be used to argue that people in general prefer subtitles. They CAN be used to argue that vocal online fans tend to prefer subtitled anime.